A Smart Take on Fashion by Two Stylish Swedes

With her cinematic vintage style and china-doll-meets-manga-heroine face, Emma Veronica Johansson stands out from the crowd. When she arrived in Stockholm, Johansson ran nightclubs before being scouted by an editor at Cosmopolitan, where she eventually became a fashion editor. Soon to become a beauty editor at Bon magazine, she’s been a stylist and a model, and recently added author to her résumé, having written a just-published book, in correspondence format, with Sweden’s first PhD in fashion studies, Philip Warkander, called Sista Skriket(Last Cry): A Book about Fashion, Death, and Erotica.*

The cover, with artwork by Duda Bebek. “The style is expressionist,” says Warkander. “But the subject matter of a young pensive woman reflects the mood of the book, in line with the ongoing discussions between Emma Veronica and myself.”

“For me,” says Johansson in reference to the subtitle, “it’s like saying a book is about fashion, fashion, and fashion. Fashion, death, and eroticism is kind of the same thing.” The book, with chapters like “Health, Death, and Sports,” “Men, Men, Men,” and “Fashion Ethics,” covers a variety of subjects. The first chapter, “What is Fashion?” poses a question that might be impossible to answer. “Fashion always relates to time, and to change,” Warkander concedes, “and I think that’s what the title alludes to, but also that there are these other layers like death and mortality that are inherent in the concept of [fashion].”

Emma Veronica was one of Warkander’s main motivations for doing the book. Fascinated and intrigued by her style, both sartorial and written, he felt she could expand his views on contemporary fashion, “as she has a lot of practical experience but no connection to academia,” where, he says, scholars “always talk about fashion in the same way because we all read the same texts. This means that I often know what they will say, even before we have begun to discuss.”

When asked to chat about his own style, Warkander, neatly dressed in gray Moncler Gamme Rouge, explained that he tends to wear his clothing over and over, as he thinks “it’s important not to always associate fashion with consumption.” Always on the move, he needs to be comfortable, but says his ambition for 2017 is “to work less so I can dress in less comfortable clothing.”

“Everyone says comfortable!” exclaims Emma Veronica. “But I’m comfortable when I’m uncomfortable. I would like to think that I’m elegant,” she says when asked to describe her style. “I just pick up bits and pieces from everywhere: An old Max Mara coat, brand-new bag . . . I just like pretty things, I don’t care if they’re clean. I shop a lot of vintage clothes, but it’s not like I’m looking for old-timey looks, I just find it more inspiring. It’s more fun to find something that’s more one-of-a-kind. If you go into a store in Stockholm it’s mostly just like a black top and if you go into a vintage store, it’s just patterns and colors everywhere. Who wouldn’t want to see that instead?”